The Keep of Fire (4 page)

She took a sip of coffee, but the mug couldn’t quite hide her grin.

Travis stood. “I should get back to my customers.”

Deirdre tilted her head. “
Your
customers? You mean you own the saloon now?”

“Ever since Andy Connell died a few years ago.”

“Well, then I had better try to drum up some business for you.” Deirdre picked up her mandolin and brushed the strings. “Thanks for the gig, Travis. You’re a good monster.”

He laughed aloud. “Oh, I wouldn’t go that far.”

Her only response was an enigmatic smile that haunted him all the way back to the bar.

Word must have spread that Deirdre Falling Hawk was back at the Mine Shaft, for by sundown the saloon was jammed with people who had come from all over the valley to listen to her music. Travis watched Deirdre from behind the bar. He thought of another bard he had known, in a place far from here, and he smiled at the memories, although it was a sad expression as well. Not a day went by that he didn’t think of Falken, Melia, Grace, and all the people he had known on Eldh.

Except that wasn’t true, was it? Because lately there had been days when, distracted by the business of the saloon, he didn’t think of Eldh at all. Would he forget it altogether someday? Or convince himself that it had all been the anguished hallucinations of a man who had lost his best friend—the compelling and realistic but entirely deranged construction of one who had wandered for two months in a haze of grief, trying to make some sort of sense of what never made any sense?

The warm sounds of Deirdre’s mandolin ended in a surge of applause. Travis gazed at the cluttered saloon and shook his head. It wasn’t that you couldn’t come home again. It was just that home was never quite the same as when you left it. How could Dorothy have
ever stood the stark black-and-white drabness of Kansas again after dancing down the Technicolor roads of Oz? Except he did love his home, drabness and all.

He smiled again, and this time there was genuine mirth to it. Max stepped out of the back room, overloaded with two racks of beer glasses. Travis took one of the racks. As he did, the strumming of the mandolin rose again on the air along with, a moment later, the wine-rich sound of Deirdre’s voice:

Travis dropped the rack of glasses on the bar; several broke. The applause of the crowd was cut short as people turned around to look for the source of the
noise. Travis stared, a gauze of paralysis woven around him by the music.

How could she know that song?

Across the saloon, a shadow touched Deirdre’s forehead. She had noticed him. The bard stood, unslung her mandolin, then threaded her way through the chairs and tables. The sound of conversation welled forth, and someone put a quarter in the jukebox. A woman asked Travis for a beer, but he couldn’t connect his thoughts with his hands. Fortunately, Max was there, and he didn’t seem to see Travis’s stunned expression as he moved in to help the customer.

Deirdre reached the bar.

“Where did you learn that?” he said in a hoarse voice.

She regarded him with almond eyes. “What’s wrong, Travis?”

He gripped the edge of the bar. “That song. Where did you learn it?”

“It was a couple of years ago. I learned it from a bard.”

The floor turned to liquid beneath Travis. Falken? Did she know Falken Blackhand? But that was impossible.

Impossible like traveling to other worlds? Impossible like magic?

He licked his lips. “A bard?”

“That’s right. I met him at the big Renaissance Festival up in Minnesota last year. We were … that is, I …” Color touched her cheekbones like Indian paintbrush.

Travis winced. She didn’t know Falken. She had learned the song from an ex-boyfriend, and Travis had embarrassed her by making her talk about it. How the ex-boyfriend had learned the song, who could say? But the connection between Eldh and Earth had worked in two directions. Why couldn’t a song have
crossed as easily as a person? And once on Earth, there was nothing to stop it from being traded among singers.

Deirdre’s fingers crept across the bar to touch his. “Travis, something’s wrong. Will you tell me what it is?”

He opened his mouth, knowing he had to tell her something, but unsure what he was going to say.

Whatever it was, the words were cut short as the saloon’s door banged open. He jerked his head up, along with a dozen of the saloon’s patrons.

At first Travis thought the man was from the Medieval Festival, like the three who had come in earlier. He was clad in a heavy black robe, as if posing as some sort of monk. Except the garment was dusty and tattered, and the more Travis looked at it, the less it looked like the robe of a monk and the more it looked the robe of a judge. Or an executioner.

The man in black lurched into the crowded saloon, and now Travis wasn’t certain he was from the Medieval Festival after all. His hands were curled into claws, and his face was scarred and pitted like the wind-scoured surface of a stone. His blistered lips moved in fretful rhythm, as if he chanted something to himself. He stumbled against a table. People leaped to their feet and scrambled back. Max was already moving to intercept him. Travis hurried after.

The man reached a hand toward a passing woman. He rasped several words—they might have been,
Where is he?
—then the woman let out a stifled scream and twisted away.

Travis swore. He considered calling Deputy Windom, but now he was closer to the man than he was to the phone. Half the people in the saloon had stopped their conversations to turn and gape. Travis swiped at his damp forehead—it was stifling in here.

Max had reached the stranger now, and he held out a hand to steady the other. The man in the black robe
hissed, recoiling like a serpent before Max could touch him.

Max drew his hand back. “I’m sorry, I—”

“Where is he?” The man’s voice was tinged with a metallic accent. “Where is Jakabar?”

Max frowned beneath his mustache. “Who?”

“I must find Jakabar.” The stranger’s hands fluttered to his robe like wounded birds, scrabbled against the cloth, tore it. “Where is Jakabar of the Gray Stone?

Travis stopped in mid-step.
What?

Max scratched his head. “Do you mean Jack Graystone?

Travis tried to speak, but when he drew in a breath it scorched his lungs. He saw others around him dab at glistening cheeks and pluck at shirts gone wet.

“I’m afraid Jack passed away last fall,” Max said.

“How?” The man’s voice was both whisper and shriek. “How did he go? Tell me!”

“It was a fire. At the antique shop.”

The man pressed his eyes shut, his expression at once rapt and afflicted. “Ah, yes. Fire. In the end, fire shall take us all.…”

He opened his eyes and it was only then Travis saw that the man’s eyes had no whites. They were black—completely and utterly black, like two hard orbs of onyx.

Someone bumped hard against Travis’s shoulder. People jostled against each other. Some were trying to leave the saloon.

“Listen, mister,” Max said in a soothing voice, “I need you to turn around and—”

“You!”

The man’s cry was like a gunshot. People scattered, then started shoving for the door. A knot formed in front of Travis, and he was pushed back. Then the knot untangled itself, and he looked up. The
man pointed at him with an accusing finger, his impossible black eyes locked on Travis.

“You are the one who drew me to this place. You are Jakabar’s heir!”

Travis clenched his right hand, and it burned like he had grabbed a fistful of hot lead. The man lurched toward him, a marionette controlled by a drunken puppeteer.

Max reached out to grab the man. “Hey, you stay away from—”

There was a sizzling sound, and the stench of burnt meat. Max howled and yanked his hand back. He clutched his wrist, his face a mask of agony.

A few last stragglers dashed past—the saloon was deserted now—and the man in black stood less than an arm’s length away. A gray wisp rose from his robe and curled into the air. It was smoke. The man’s robe was smoldering.

“Travis,” a soft voice said behind him. “Travis, take a step back.”

Deirdre. He could see her out of the corner of his eye. Travis wanted to listen to her, but the man’s black gaze stabbed him, fixing him to the spot.

“The key,” the man said.

Travis shook his head. His brain was roasting in his skull. “I don’t … I don’t understand.”

Peace crept across the man’s cracked face. “Yes, it is you to whom I must give the key.”

“Now, Travis,” Deirdre said. “Get back.”

Max slumped against a wall, still holding his wrist, his expression hazed by pain.

Movement was futile. The heat welded Travis, fused bone and muscle. Somehow he forced his jaw to work. “Who … who are you?”

The man smiled, sharp as a knife wound, and reached out a hand. Travis watched smoke rise from the dark fabric of his sleeve.

“Beware—it will consume you.”

“Travis!”

Deirdre’s shout broke through the fatal heat. He heaved himself back, clattered against a table, then looked up to see the man in black go rigid. He raised twisted arms, threw his head back, and shrieked.

“Kelephon! Jakabar! Help me!”

Then the man in the black robe burst into flame.

Sunlight crept into the valley as Castle County Sheriff’s Deputy Jacine Fidelia Windom drove the coroner’s van up the hill south of town to the Castle Heights Cemetery.

The sun had just crested the eastern escarpment of Signal Ridge, but the sky had been blue for hours—a trick the mountains always played on the dawn. Jace rolled down the van’s window, and dry wind rushed into the vehicle. The morning was already hot. By noon it would be another scorcher. That concerned the deputy.

Not that the heat bothered her. Despite the oppressive weather, Jace hadn’t traded her crisp khaki trousers, shirt, and tie for lighter attire. She wasn’t afraid of sweat. But there were others on whom the heat wasn’t so easy. Ranchers and their livestock. The frail and elderly. If this heat wave kept up, she would be making more trips up this hill.

Jace checked the black box on the seat beside her to be sure it wasn’t wandering when she hit the curves. Taking a John Doe’s ashes to the cemetery for interment wasn’t part of her job description, but Kyle Evans, the Castle County coroner, was at that moment in New Jersey burying his mother, so it fell to Jace to see to it this stranger made it to his own last rest. Not that Jace minded.
To protect and to serve
.
That was the oath she had sworn to Sheriff Dominguez on her twenty-fifth birthday two years ago. And as far as Jace was concerned, anything that helped someone else was part of her job description.

The deputy guided the van around a switchback, her eyes locked on the road behind green, wire-rimmed Ray-Bans. She took all the curves at exactly the speed posted on the yellow road signs, and she steered the van with precise movements of her small, strong hands. She did so because that was the right way to drive a vehicle. There was one right way to do everything in this world, and that was the way Jace did it.

Although every day in her work she encountered people who broke the law, Jace never understood them. Some screamed and cursed at her as she wrote them a ticket or handcuffed them, shouting that the laws oppressed them, while others wept and sobbed that the laws weren’t fair. But Jace knew they were wrong. A world without rules was a world without meaning. Laws didn’t limit. Instead they made things like happiness, comfort, and beauty possible. Artists painted using principles of color, hue, and perspective. Music was based on mathematics. The laws of physics kept humans from flying off the planet and into space.

The deputy was seldom troubled by dreams, but one that came to her from time to time chilled her to the core. She would dream she was in a tiny boat, tossed on a great sea that was neither light nor dark, liquid nor solid. Then a wave would come, tearing apart the boat. She would try to swim to safety, except it was impossible to determine which way was up. Jace would wake gasping and for an hour would stare into the night, looking at the hard, distinct outlines of bed and walls and floor before she could shut her eyes and return to sleep again.

A world of order Jace understood, but the world she glimpsed in her dream, the great sea of chaos …

All she could think was that that must have been the world her father had glimpsed the day she came home from fifth grade and found him hanging from a rafter in the garage.

The road turned to gravel. Jace adjusted her speed to compensate, then guided the vehicle around the last few twists. She came to a halt in the dirt parking lot, scooped up the box of ashes, and stepped out of the van.

There wasn’t much to the Castle Heights Cemetery these days. Not that there ever really had been. Throughout the last 130 years, most people in Castle County had their loved ones transported to the more fashionable and expensive cemeteries of Denver when it was time for the long sleep. Weeds tangled over anonymous graves, their wooden markers long turned to splinters, and wild raspberry gathered over other mounds like thorny shrouds. Elsewhere gravestones were planted in the ground at odd angles, as if at any moment the entire place might slide down the slope to the valley bottom for its own final burial.

Jace glanced down at the box tucked into the crook of her arm. This was not how she liked cases to end up—without even a name to put on a marker. But there had been nothing left of the man to run an ID on, not even his teeth. Just a few splinters of burnt bone and a heap of ash. Jace had checked a description of the man, given to her by Travis Wilder, against a database of missing persons, but to no avail. She would keep checking, but doubted she would find an answer.